2nd child, abortion at end of 6th month.
3rd child, abortion at end of 6th month.
4th child, abortion at end of 5th month.
5th child, abortion soon after quickening, Summer, 1838.
6th child, still-born, 7th October, 1839.
7th child, no clear record given.
Also other somewhat parallel cases given, the constant incidental accompaniment being painful physical suffering and grave inconvenience, frequently with fatal results. Medical records are full of similar histories. To the unsophisticated mind, two questions sternly suggest themselves: Firstly, Is it meet or right for an honourable profession, or any individual member of it, to be particeps criminis in such proceedings as the above? and, secondly, is the indicated connubial morality on any higher level, or likely to be attended with any better consequences, than the prior ignorant or savage abuses which are responsible for woman’s present physical condition?
The advocacy of cardinal reform in this direction—in the wrong done both to the individual and the race—is urgent part of the duty of our newly-taught medical women. Nor are their eyes closed nor their mouths dumb in the matter. Dr. Caroline B. Winslow is quoted by the Woman’s Journal of Boston, U.S., 16th Jan., 1892, as saying in an article on “The Right to be Well Born”: “What higher motive can a man have in life than to labour steadily to prepare the way for the coming of a higher, better humanity?... Dense ignorance prevails in our profession, and is reflected by laymen. All their scientific studies and years of medical practice have failed to convict men of the wrongs and outrages done to women; wrongs that no divine laws sanction, and no legal enactments can avert....
“The physician is a witness of the modern death-struggles and horrors of maternity; he sees lives pass out of his sight; he makes vain attempts to restore broken constitutions, broken by violating divine laws that govern organic matter: laws that are obeyed by all animal instinct; yet all this knowledge, observation, and experience have failed to reveal to the benighted intellect and obtuse moral sense of the ordinary practitioner this great wrong. He makes no note of the unhallowed abuse that only man dares; neither will he mark the disastrous and deteriorating effect of this waste of vital force on his own offspring. The mental, moral, and physical imperfections of the rising generation are largely the result of outraged motherhood.”
7.—“The spurious function growing ...”